quotations about love
Love isn't something we can just turn off like a well-oiled faucet. It drips, keeping us up at night.
HEIDI K. ISERN
"The responsibility to fall out of love is on you", Quartz, August 5, 2016
Love seems to survive life, and to reach beyond it. I think we take it with us past the grave. Do we not still give it to those who have left us? May we not hope that they feel it for us, and that we shall leave it here in one or two fond bosoms, when we also are gone?
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
The Virginians
Love's never a fair trade.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
Margaret Atwood (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. Her works encompass a variety of themes including gender and identity, religion and myth, the power of language, climate change, and "power politics".
Love, amid the other graces of this world, is like a cathedral tower, which begins at the earth and at the first is surrounded by the other parts of the structure. But at length, rising above buttresses, wall and arch, and parapet and pinnacle, it shoots, spire-like, many a foot right into the air, so high that the huge cross on its summit glows like a spark in the morning light, and shines like a star in the evening sky, when the rest of the pile is enveloped in darkness. So love here is surrounded by the other graces, and divides the honors with them; but they will have felt the wrap of night and of darkness, when it will shine, luminous, against the sky of eternity.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Love, which, in concert with Abstinence, established Faith, and which, along with Patience, builds up Chastity, is like the columns that sustain the four corners of a house. For it was that same Love which planted a glorious garden redolent with precious herbs and noble flowers--roses and lilies--which breathed forth a wondrous fragrance, that garden on which the true Solomon was accustomed to feast his eyes.
HILDEGARD OF BINGEN
letter to the Monk Guibert, 1176
Please do not think for a second, as some people do, that Love is primarily an affair of the emotions. It is not: it never ought to be. It is an affair of the will: it is an act of choice.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
Spiritual Letters of Monsignor R. Hugh Benson to One of His Converts
Some meet love's dreams when kissed by death,
And some again in youth,
But all have felt the quickening breath
Of love's undying truth.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"Love's Dreams"
Edwin Leibfreed published several books of poetry, including A Garland of Verse (1910), A Soliloquy of Life (1915), and The Man of a Thousand Loves (1932).
Strange
indeed how love in other
ways so particular
will pick a corner
in that charnel-house
tidy it and coil up there, perhaps
even fall asleep--her face
turned to the wall!
CHINUA ACHEBE
Attento, Soul Brother!
The utopia of love is completion to the point of stillness. The ideal act of love is to contain all.
JOHN BERGER
Keeping a Rendezvous
To go through life without love is to travel through the world in a carriage with closed windows.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
Why does a man who is truly in love insist that this relationship must continue and be "lifelong"? Because life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic. Who would want to wake up halfway through an operation?
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, Jan. 19, 1938
Love lives in sealed bottles of regret.
SEAN O'FAOLAIN
Saturday Evening Post, Aug. 13, 1966
Love, slow and gradual in its growth, is too much like friendship ever to be a violent passion.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of the Affections", Les Caractères
Jean de La Bruyère (16 August 1645 - 11 May 1696) was a French philosopher and moralist noted for his satire. His Caractères, which appeared in 1688, captures the psychological, social, and moral profile of French society of his time.
Pains of love be sweeter far
Than all other pleasures are.
JOHN DRYDEN
Tyrannic Love
Sex is the joining of two bodies; love is the joining of two souls.
GARY D. CHAPMAN
Making Love
Gary Demonte Chapman (born January 10, 1938) is an American author, radio talk show host, and the senior associate pastor at Calvary Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He is most noted for his book The Five Love Languages, which outlines five general ways that romantic partners express and experience love.
The prerequisite to loving others is to love yourself. If you don't have a healthy respect for who you are, and if you don't learn to accept yourself faults and all, you will never be able to properly love other people.
JOEL OSTEEN
Become a Better You
True love is a durable fire,
In the mind ever burning.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH
As Ye Came from the Holy Land
Sir Walter Raleigh (c. 1552 - 1618) was an English writer, poet, soldier, politician, courtier, spy, and explorer. He is also well known for popularizing tobacco in England.
We do not say of Love that he is myopic. We do not say of Love that he is astigmatic. We say quite simply, Love is blind. We might go further and say, Love is deaf. That would be a profound and obvious truth. We might go further still and say, Love is dumb. But that would be a profound and obvious lie. For love is always an extraordinarily fluent talker.
MAX BEERBOHM
A Christmas Garland
When a man falls in love suddenly his whole centre changes. Up to that point he has probably referred everything to himself--considered things from his own point. When he falls in love the whole thing is shifted; he becomes a part of the circumference--perhaps even the whole circumference; someone else becomes the centre.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
A Mirror of Shalott
Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.
BIBLE
John 15:13